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The original location of Sanagan’s Meat Locker, on Baldwin Street in Kensington Market, was so small it made an H&M change room seem spacious. When he moved a few doors down, into the 5,000-square-foot former home of European Meats, there was doubt about demand meeting supply. But within a year he had to expand. Even though the retail storefront generates 70 per cent of sales, the wholesale side of the business, supplying meat to restaurants including Cava, Colette, Grand Electric and Borealia, required him to open a second facility.

So that’s where I go for my “Kitchen Temp,” the underground butchering room at Bloor and Symington. I arrive at 9 a.m. and am handed a lab coat, apron and rubber boots.

A wooden skid on the floor holds five pigs, each one split in half lengthwise. From nose to tail, the hogs are perfectly bisected, the same collection of rib bones, belly, loin and hoofs found on each portion.

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In addition to Sanagan, three butchers — Andrew McDonald, Ben Dyck and Chris Spencer — have been here since 5:30 a.m.

The use of knives to portion larger pieces of animals into smaller pieces of meat, is variously known as butchering, cutting, processing, breaking. It all amounts to the same thing.

Once we get started, I can’t say what anyone else in the room is doing. I know they’re busy. But with my knife hand in near constant motion, I keep my eyes on the prize of not injuring myself, abandoning the writer’s instinct to observe my surroundings.

McDonald picks up a 100-pound half pig without help, moving it to the work table. To a soundtrack of power ballads, McDonald and I immediately set to breaking down pork, using a boning knife, scimitar (like the sword, a long, curved blade), hacksaw and band saw.

On the first pig, he shows me where to make markings, four ribs below the shoulder and two fingers above the hip, to separate it into three sections; shoulder, middle and ham. Then we saw through vertebra in both spots.

When I helped break down a cow at Richmond Station, sawing through the thick bones nearly dislocated my shoulder. But the pig’s bones are relatively easier, snapping with the equivalent of 10 shoulder press reps. Once we’re through the bone, we switch to the scimitar blade to separate the flesh and fat. Again and again I remind my fingers to stay hidden, to keep a solid grip on the meat and avoid any jerky, finger-slicing movements.

For the top section, I remove the head from the shoulder (a.k.a. butt and picnic) with a boning knife. Once severed, the head comes off easily and then I use the band saw to separate the hooves and shanks.

From the midsection, the tenderloin practically hops out of the ribs’ underside (and I take one home for dinner). Between knife and band saw, we split the midsection into racks and bellies, then remove the side ribs, placing them on to Dyck’s cutting board for him to clean.

At first, this is an overwhelming amount of information, so much of the road map marked only by the feel of unseen bones, the knife plunging into flesh, searching for the connective tendon that will unlock one muscle from another.

But as we repeat the process, it becomes clearer. I begin to know what to feel for, how hard to slice, kind of like giving someone a massage, how you quickly learn where there are knots in their back.

At the same time, my hands are seizing up from the cold; it’s 8 degrees Celsius in here. Not freezing. But the meat is cold as well. My hands are constantly wet, often with blood. Running them under warm water shocks them too much.

Just as I start stamping my feet to fight off the cold, we take a break to sit down in the relative warmth of another room for a staff meal.

Sanagan has gathered scraps of ground chicken, beef and pork, remaindered from restaurant orders and rolled the mixture into balls.

He pan fries and coats the meatballs with a sticky honey garlic sauce. Hamburgers are another mainstay of staff meals here, or random pieces of fried meat on day old buns from the retail shop, where the lunch counter serves sandwiches with bread from neighbour Blackbird Bakery.

It feels like playing poker in a bank vault to be eating a cocktail of meats inside the subterranean meat locker. The only thing missing is vegetables.

“Rice is a vegetable here,” Sanagan says, spooning some onto his plate. “Yeah, I guess we don’t eat a lot of vegetables down here.”

Honey Garlic Meatballs

When you work in a butcher shop, meatballs or sausages are made from whatever’s leftover. Our staff meal meatballs were beef, chicken and pork, only because there was an excess of all three. Use whatever you like or is available, whether it’s lamb, bison or dewback. You can’t go wrong.

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